


Else

by whyyesitscar



Category: Glee
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-05
Updated: 2012-11-05
Packaged: 2017-11-26 03:53:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/646271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whyyesitscar/pseuds/whyyesitscar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The thing about her, the thing about drawing her, which is basically everything about her, is that it doesn't feel like you're pulling anything out that isn't already there."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Else

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Bronze](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/15889) by amdev. 



You never really expected to be an artist. You were like your parents. You enjoyed art—your hobby, your interest—but you were still waiting around for a real career path to pop up. Of course, it never had, and you're secretly glad for that. You just don't always know what to do with it.

But you’ve grown used to it. You’ve grown into it and _into_ it. It’s funny what happens when you mix your passion with financial stability. You thought about this once, during your watercolor phase. Mixing grass, ivy, stems and leaves—you thought you’d be the next Cézanne, just like everyone else does—you watched white sink into green. Sometimes the green ate black, and it struck you that you couldn’t ever separate them again.

Two weeks later you discovered sculpting. You’ve always loved to flirt with permanency.

/

You find that sculpting brings out even more arrogant art wanks than painting. Absent the vast color spectrum to analyze, critics like to focus on the finish of a sculpture. You find it extremely pedantic, especially since it’s not something you ever really thought to control.

You hadn’t even really considered the idea until one of your first sculptures was shown as part of an artists’ collaboration. You can’t remember what it was about or even what you created, but you do remember her.

Back in those days, you’d hang around a gallery incognito. You have hypersensitive hearing when people are talking about you. It’s like you’re a bat and your sonar is only tuned to the frequency at which your name leaves other people’s mouths. So you’d flit around the crowd, listening for sibilant whispers. Most of the comments were nice, generic. That day, it was what wasn’t being said that interested you most.

She was standing in front of your sculpture, just looking at it. With almost everyone else, you could tell what they thought about it just from their posture. The ones who come to galleries with their boyfriends and girlfriends (the ones who don’t really care about art), they shove their hands in their pockets, draw their lips down into a vague _yeah, okay_ expression of approval. The pretentious critics stroke their chins in a cliché that fools no one. Serious art critics hold their hands clasped behind their backs. They peruse a piece with every other part of their face—nose, eyebrows, forehead—before they even think to use their eyes.

She wasn’t doing any of those things, which was why she intrigued you. She was standing a respectable distance away from your sculpture, head cocked, one hand rubbing at the back of her neck. You sidled up to her unobtrusively, apparently scanning the sculpture yourself. She had a puzzled expression to match her distracted stance, and all it took was one comment. You don’t even remember what you said, but she immediately started talking about the texture of the clay. Feeling very much the art snob you constantly professed to hate, you explained about the different tools an artist can use to convey skin or fur or whatever tactile impression the piece necessitated. She shook her head before you were done and pointed to the bottom of the sculpture, the part you tried to hide. It was dented, she said, marring what was otherwise a stunning piece.

At that, you smiled and ducked your head and admitted that you’d slipped.

Her inelegant grunt of confusion had sealed the deal. By all rights, she was the kind of girl you stayed away from. Prim, short haircut. The forehead of a Fitzgerald or Stein. In her sensible flats and demure cardigan, she could easily be pompous. But her eyes were melancholy, skittish, and she surprised you.

You made a friend that day.

/

She had barely gotten to know you when she asked you for a favor. (From her lips, it sounded more like a request that you’d be crazy to turn down, like when thirsty kids ask for water). She wanted a sculpture. She even promised to pay for all your materials and however you wanted to quantify your time. She asked for this like it was a lifeline, and you wondered what she could possibly need that badly.

But she couldn’t give you a straight answer. She didn’t care what it looked like. She needed you to sculpt a feeling. That feeling of just…

Years later you finally get started on the art that hangs in the words she couldn’t finish.

/

You still plan to make good on your promise of a sculpture. You absolutely do. It’s just you don’t really know where to start. You like working with abstracts, with shapes that don’t look like something so much as they remind you of something. That thing that’s always on the tip of your tongue, that thing you’ll never remember, that vague beep in the back of your mind that says _I’ve seen this before_ but won’t tell you where. That’s what you sculpt. That’s what your art is.

You don’t do portraits or people or things. And nobody’s making you do them now. It’s just that since the feeling of this commission is so undefined, you feel like you have to put limits on it. You have to mold it into a recognizable form so you can fill the rest in with inklings and feelings and whispers. And if there’s anything that fits the category of an undefined definite shape, it’s the human body.

So you put out a flyer for models, feeling more than a little bit creepy with every one you tape up.

(It’s because you’ve already decided this has to be a nude sculpture. You won’t put that on paper because who knows what kind of people that would attract, but it’s nonnegotiable.)

It takes you three days, six weirdos and one actual sociopath before you find someone who might work. She sounds a little nervous, but that’s three steps ahead of the deep male voices slobbering all over the phone, even though the ad clearly specified a female model. You try not to think about the fact that they now have your number, and it makes you feel a lot better that you never put your name on anything.

But this one, she seems sincere. You’ve always found nerves and rambling words to be good indicators of a genuine soul. She calls you in the middle of making dinner, so you’re half listening and half trying to concentrate on not chopping off your fingers. You wince a lot during that call—not because you keep nicking yourself with a blade but because you’re sure she’s going to turn you down. When you have to preface everything you say with a prolonged _uhh_ because you’ve got a cucumber in one hand and a broken peeler in the other—well, it doesn’t usually inspire much confidence.

But she agrees to meet you the next day and you wonder if maybe she likes nerves, too.

/

You watch her from behind a curtain as she walks up the street to your house. You laugh a little because when you put out an ad for a model you didn’t think you’d get someone who looked like she could be an _actual_ model. You briefly think that the fact that she’s really gorgeous means she’ll probably be okay with posing nude—because who wouldn’t with that body—but then you shake the thought away. Just because she’s hot doesn’t mean you should be shallow.

(Anyway, you don’t do shallow when it comes to art. Shallow is hard. You like to gouge). 

When she almost twists her ankle on a pebble, you decide that she’s the one. If no one else calls, if she doesn’t have a problem with the whole no-clothes thing, she’s got it. You really, really hope she’s actually as easygoing as she looks.

It’s funny, sometimes, being an artist. People think you have this detailed knowledge about colors or lines or whatever, and yeah, maybe you would if you had gone to art school or dabbled in graphic design. But you’re self-taught, self-realized, and you’ve always liked a bit of mystery. It’s because of your art that you notice the little things, or maybe you make art because you’ve always had an eye for detail. Either way you’re really good at reading people.

(Maybe that’s why you don’t sculpt them. You already know what their bodies have to say. You want to pull out what’s painted on the inside, guess at the twists and turns, the words and pictures that push on the outside parts. You wonder if it’s like a photo negative, if your skin is the color it is because it sits opposite the color spectrum from your organs and blood and bones. The best part is that you’ll never know).

You walk through your house more confidently than you feel, hoping she’ll follow you. You’ve decided that the only way she’ll agree to pose nude is if you act like it’s nothing. No big deal, you’re just stripping for a stranger, and this one won’t fling dollar bills at you, so it’s kind of classy. You just throw it out there, completely nonchalant, and pretend not to notice the way she misses a step.

Except you can’t _not_ notice because she does seem genuinely uncomfortable so you tell her all about your studio, how it’s your baby and it’s perfect because you made it that way. Because when you sculpt or even set foot in there, that’s when you completely let go. You have this mode you get in when you’re working, and even though you’re a fairly open person by nature, you still have limits, lines you don’t like to cross. When you’re in your studio, you’re kind of naked too, even if you’re wearing your baggy, stained overalls. So you need some kind of barricade from prying eyes.

So you try to reassure her with words and words and words about where you work and then you remember that words aren’t exactly your thing, and you decide to just show her instead. She doesn’t say much, just looks at everything, taking it all in, absorbing the walls and pictures and sofa until you can see them sink into her eyes.

(Eyes like the sea, a poet would say. Eyes like Joni Mitchell, a musician would say. Eyes like clouds laughing, maybe like a fallen chick chirping when she’s sad, an artist might say.

Eyes like blue, you’ll say, because blue means something, too).

You show her some sketches just to really win her over, even though you’re pretty sure she’s not going to bail at this point. They aren’t anything too structured—really you just immersed yourself in the feeling that this sculpture was going to be and let your hand go. You hope that she’ll look at them and understand.

You watch her as she takes them in. That isn’t a figure of speech—you can actually see her eyes suck in the curves and lines. Charcoal drowns in blue and you feel like your stomach is exploding. It’s always been you that devoured everything. People like to say that about your eyes or your dark hair, how it’s a black hole sometimes and you kind of like it. Only here she is doing that to something you created and you find you like that even more.

She doesn’t say anything when she’s done looking. She just kind of smiles and her eyebrows knit together, assessing you, before she leaves.

You really, really hope she comes back.

/

A few hours into that first day is when she gets it. You have only a fleeting grasp on what exactly it is, but you see it so clearly in her face and body that you don’t really need to name it. You just need to sketch it, and that’s exactly what you do.

She’s found the music and lost a bit of herself in the process.

She asked you at the start of the day how you wanted her, and you laughed a little at her nervous turn of phrase. So you showed her the sketches again, said you’d be working from the side to start, but other than that you just told her to do what felt right. You didn’t want to push anything because you had this instinct that she’d get it, and anyway art is terrible when it’s forced. It isn’t even art then, just ideas that died in clay coffins, drowned in watercolors.

She was tense for a good half an hour, unsure about being that exposed. You just let her feel it. It goes away eventually, everything does. If you sit long enough, you stop feeling things and just start being them instead.

You notice that she’s gotten it because you’ve stopped seeing arms and legs and torsos. Instead you see the tiny creases you wouldn’t see unless you were looking; birthmarks and the way her stomach moves like a bellows, steady and soft. In between scrubbing lines and scratching angles, you notice just how beautiful she is. Her blond hair is a waterfall; if you look past it, you can almost see it move in a never-ending flow. Sometimes her chest heaves with a particularly deep breath and you wonder what it would sound like up close, if you could lay your ear against her skin and just listen. Her toe twitches every so often and you giggle quietly, imagining a cat licking her sole or maybe someone has really long nails and she’s just ticklish.

This girl is more intriguing than you’d thought she would be, and you had set your expectations pretty high to start. The thing about her—the thing about drawing her, which is basically everything about her—is that it doesn’t feel like you’re pulling anything out that isn’t already there. You think she might be the first person you’ve met whose insides are the same color as her outsides, which is perfect because her outsides are already made up of colors invisible to the human eye. You can feel them radiating off her in standing waves, and you wonder which opposing forces are colliding to create them.

(That’s the bit of her that you still can’t figure out. You can see her insides and her outsides, but they create something even more substantial than that. You don’t think you could ever find a canvas big enough. There isn’t enough clay on the planet to sculpt the whole of her, but you’re going to try).

You hate to disturb her peace—and that’s what it is, because peace is what’s left in the absence of feeling—but it’s been a few hours and this break is as much for you as it is out of sympathy for her probably numb butt. You turn away so she can put her robe back on, asking if she wants anything to drink, a snack, a smoke (because you sure as hell need one of those).

She sort of just mills around the kitchen instead and you go outside. It’s the first time you’ve wanted to have untinted windows because you’d really like to smoke in the garden and watch her at the same time. But you need a smoke more than you need to watch her. You just spent who-knows-how-many hours doing that.

So you suck on the end of a cigarette until you almost cough and it’s half ash. It sprinkles over your fingers and you think about peace, about what it would feel like if you were both occupying the same space and not feeling anything together.

The first day and you’ve found what this sculpture is supposed to be about.

You still don’t know what to do with it.

/

Tuesdays and Fridays quickly become your favorite parts of the week. Sometimes, on the in-between days, you wonder if it’s crazy how much she fascinates you. You wonder if you would have gotten this interested had your model been anyone else. You don’t work with models. You don’t know if artists normally get this attached, but you think they must on some level. You’re seeing someone at her most vulnerable, her physically most naked state, so it isn’t too out of the question to wonder what she looks like when she doesn’t have any emotional clothes on. And given how much time you spend together, it isn’t hard to jump to conclusions either.

She doesn’t talk to you much, but you want her to. You want to know why yes is her favorite word, apart from the obvious reasons, and she has to have more than those because there isn’t anything obvious about her. You want to ask her what her least favorite word is, so maybe you can change her mind. You want more than the small talk she allows you before you start work.

You ask her what she likes to listen to, because after art and words, music tells you a lot about someone. You hope this will make her talk. Because music always makes you talk in one way or another. But it doesn’t for her; she just deflects back to what you listen to, so you pull out records and artists that you’ve only listened to a couple of times.

(You’ve always been one to work out your feelings, and what you’re feeling right now is mystery, the unknown.

You shift around the pictures on the wall so that she can feel the mystery, too. Maybe that will make her ask questions.

She looks like the sort of person who wants to ask questions.)

/

It all comes to a head when you finish with her profile. You can’t stretch out your sketching any longer, as much as you’d like to. You’ve been doing that for a few weeks, mostly because you can tell she’s still a little unsure. It’s easier to work from the side because then she doesn’t have to look at you.

(You’ve been looking at her the whole time and it’s great, but you know you have an artist’s gaze and that can be off-putting sometimes. It took a while for you to grow into it).

You watch her (again) as you tell her. Her mouth twitches a little and her eyebrows knit together just the tiniest bit. She’s trying so hard to be calm, and you want to tell her that you are, too. She’s not the only one who has to deal with being exposed. You have this feeling that when she finally faces you, when she finally has no other option but to look at you, you might melt.

So it’s not totally for her sake that you invite her to dinner. You want to see what she’s like outside of working, sure, but you want to make sure that that version of her isn’t as dismantling as what you see in your studio. You pose dinner as a casual thing—inside you kind of feel that it’s as casual as when you told her she’d be naked in your house—and tell her to ask you anything, if she wants.

She wants, but she doesn’t ask, so you start talking in hopes that she’ll interrupt and offer something of herself. You tell her about your nondescript high school experience, because it feels right to start chronologically and you don’t consider your childhood very titillating stuff. You tell her that college wasn’t really interesting until the car crash, and then, like a perfect movie cliché, you found your art.

You tell a lot of people your car crash story. It’s an easy thing to say, how months in the hospital gave you time to think. It was your Kahlo period, you tell everyone. Except you haven’t quite reached her level of surreal. You tell everyone that she was a surrealist and you’re an abstract artist. It’s an easy thing to distinguish and it sets off an avenue of conversation that is personal but not too revealing.

So you tell her about the car crash. You tell her about surrealism and abstraction. And when she doesn’t start asking questions, you tell her more. You tell her that it was a conscious decision of yours not to fall into a surrealist way of life. Because it’s easy, you tell her. It’s so easy, when you’ve been confined to a hospital bed for four months, to think that real life is actually surreal. A hallucination, sometimes. But art—and life—is far more interesting when, upon reentering reality and normalcy, you look for the abstract in everyday things. You find the bits of insanity, the atoms that were lurking in the back of your mind, in traffic lights and barking dogs; in just-burnt coffee and squeaky laughs. Frida Kahlo took life and painted it into dreams—terrifying, uncomfortable, beautiful dreams.

You like to take dreams and mold them into something you can touch.

She doesn’t talk as she cuts vegetables. She doesn’t talk when you set the table. She doesn’t talk when you sit down or when you eat or when you pour her another glass of wine. So _you_ do. You tell her things that you don’t tell any of your friends, even ones born out of art galleries and feelings. You just keep talking and talking and waiting for her to say something, waiting for her to do anything more than just look at you.

She doesn’t, really. She doesn’t talk, but she listens. She sees. She laughs, and you keep telling your funny stories because her laugh is like a song. It’s like if she laughed hard enough or long enough, you would be able to find lyrics and a beat, a chorus, and maybe you’d make it your ringtone.

You can tell she’s warming up to you and you wish you knew just what to say to turn that warmth into a flame.

/

After six weeks of drawing her from the side, you should be used to her body. You should be used to seeing her naked and you shouldn’t feel the pull to stare at her longer than even an artist would.

But, oh, you do. You have to remind yourself every time you begin a session that you have charcoal in your hand, that you’re the one who’s supposed to do something. You have to tell yourself to work even though there’s a whole three-quarters of her that your eyes haven’t mapped yet. So you shake your head every day and keep your gaze trained on your sketchpad, looking up only when you need to.

It’s because she’s watching you. You feel it after a few minutes, which means she’s probably been watching you for longer than that. It’s an unfamiliar feeling but not an unwelcome one. You do know, however, that you’d make a terrible model, were your roles switched.

(It doesn’t stop you from wondering, though. How she would sketch you, how she would see you. Would she have problems with your hands, like you did, or would your eyelashes be constantly erased and smudged? Your skin—would it look as soft as you think it does? Does it look soft to her at all? How would she draw your hair, and, as she swooped her charcoal in wispy strands, would she wonder what it felt like for real, like you do?

It’s a big question—what would your body make her _feel_?)

She watches you until you both need to stop. You heard her laugh again, while you were sketching, which she hasn’t really done before. It’s a step closer to the relationship that you have with the woman in the drawings, the one you want to have with the woman in the flesh. Still, when she asks to see your sketches, you stumble. Maybe she’ll see what you do—maybe your sketch-woman and this real-woman will merge and you’ll have dreams you can touch even before you start to sculpt.

It’s kind of terrifying to think about, so you step outside to smoke while she looks at them.

You panic even more outside because your sketches are the most vulnerable parts of you twice-over. You’re better at sculpting. Your fingers, smooth from baths in slip but dry from the way the clay cracks over your nails and knuckles, are not made for things like charcoal pencils. You are clumsy with materials that aren’t malleable at the start. So when you show someone a sketch, they’re seeing the unfinished part of your ideas, and mistakes always reveal more than you want or intend.

(The extra kicker comes with the fact that rough sketches are emotionally exposed, and these are already so heavy with feelings that you’re surprised you both haven’t been overcome.

It’s terrifying to think about her looking at your sketches, about the fact that she might be realizing you’re falling in love with her at the same time that you are.

Boy, if that doesn’t make you reach for a second cigarette, nothing will).

You can’t really tell what she’s thinking when you walk back in, which isn’t strange. She’s always been hard to really figure out, even for your well-trained artist eyes. Her eyes are roaming lazily over the first batch. She has her hand on the bottom right corner, like she’d gotten ready to turn the page and then forgotten how. So you take over, smiling, sidling up next to her. The cold air wafting off your skin creates weather systems with her heat, cracking thunder that rolls and reverberates to the deepest parts of you.

You turn pages and explain your sketches, finishing your unfinished thoughts. You point out your favorite parts and, after thinking it over, you point out your least favorite parts, too—just in case she likes those best. You keep talking, nervously offering words that might mask how obvious you think your drawings are. Boil them down to mechanics, you think, and maybe then she won’t be taken aback at the feelings hidden within lines and negative space.

But she is, and her answer is far less abstract than your art.

She leaves.

/

(When you part for good, it is on the same awkward vein as when you met, only this time there is no mysterious fondness. There isn’t anything to build toward, just memories in sketches, remnants of the different paths you might have taken if either of you had been more direct.

That’s the problem with abstract art.

If you want people to find things in your pieces, you have to lose them first.)

/

It takes you longer to sculpt than it does to sketch. Months longer. Christmas tinsel gives way to February hearts and then the open doors of May, June—portents of summer.

You’re surrounded by her every day, but you don’t think about her. Shapes migrate from two-dimensional lines to forms that fit your fingers. You don’t think about what she looked like in your studio; you just recreate her. You don’t think about her closed eyes, the way her shoulders adjusted as if separate from her thought process. You don’t think about all the music you’d play, how the songs you barely knew yourself suddenly became the most familiar tunes. And not just familiar in the way that happens when you listen to something more than once. But familiar in that way that you’re recalling a formerly forgotten childhood memory; familiar in the way that happens when you run into someone who used to be your best friend but will never be again.

You don’t think about that at all.

(Six months later and you’re a better liar than you would have ever thought).

You know you’re done because you stop feeling anything. So you show it to your friend and she hugs you for a long time, apologizing even though she won’t tell you why. She shows it to _her_ friend, the one who owns the gallery that you’ve always thought was a little too elitist for your taste. But their clientele is too good to be ignored, and you find yourself in a sophisticated dress, donning sophisticated glasses because they’re the only things that are going to counteract the headache these high-society types will surely give you.

You can’t silently scope out a gallery like you used to, which is a shame. You’re too much on show for your liking, but it is nice that you can thank everyone who helped make your sculpture real. It’s nice that people will listen. The girl of sculptures past, the one who hung on every word and criticism, who let them sink into her skin until they settled at just the perfect place to be useful—she has been replaced by the woman who lets every oil-word roll off her water-back, except for the ones that come from the people she already respects. This woman gets to offer words of her own that people let sink into their skin, and they are always useful because they are always right.

This woman gets to move around the crowd at her own leisurely pace, not skip out of eyesight and into earshot.

You have to smile after your speech. You have to smile and wonder if this is your thing, because this is twice now that you’ve snuck up on blondes that are deep in thought over one of your sculptures. But it can’t be your thing because this blonde is so much different than the first—afraid rather than melancholy, skittish in that way that she’s expecting a terrible answer to her most hopeful question.

You wait with her, wonder if the two glasses of champagne she downs rather quickly (except for those last sips) are a bad omen or a fateful sign. If she’s come back with sad words or tentatively happy ones.

(You remind yourself that she’s come back, first of all, and why would she come back to say things you thought she said six months ago?)

When she lets you lead her to an emptier room, when she shakes with the relief of isolation and sitting down, when she smiles as your lips leave barely-there trails against her just-as-soft-as-it-looked skin—that’s when you know you haven’t heard anything like what she’s about to say.

You can’t actually know certain things about uncertain words, but your instincts are telling you that the words about to come out of her mouth are going to go down as some of your favorites.

But she doesn’t say anything. Not in that room, not when you take her home, not when you stand in front of your mirror and watch her watch you.

She doesn’t say anything for so long that you realize just what you’re doing. You’re not ashamed, just unsure, as you stand there without a dress on, without a lot on. You’re one of your sketches, rough and covered with mistakes, and she’s got all the protection in the world. You find that you can’t look at her, not even when she finally says something and asks you to, because what if she finds something even rougher underneath, what if she cracks something you can’t put back together with slip and methodical stretching?

But her fingers are smooth when they touch your stomach, your hips, your arms, pushing your eraser-hands away from inerasable scars, and that’s all it takes.

/

You let her be the artist that night. You try to be the model she was for you; you let her look at you with an artist’s gaze that is one part learned and three parts something you’ve never even imagined. You dip your hands over valleys and deltas you’d only gotten to visit with your imagination. You let her discover yours until you’re not sure who’s making art of whom.

You marvel at your very own Pinocchio, an art-girl turned real. Or maybe you’re Pygmalion and this woman has been granted to you by the very goddess of love herself.

That’s what it feels like when you fall into bed, like you’ve been given something that is made of so many of your dreams that you can’t believe it’s also real.

You watch her when she falls asleep and when she wakes up again, too—just in case the morning wipes the dream-planes of her face completely from your memory.

When it doesn’t, you laugh together and fall asleep again. You draw her closer to you, feeling the idea of her collide with the feel of her between your clasped hands. It’s dreams come to life, and as you fall asleep you realize that’s why you prefer abstract art. You don’t work with things and models because you weren’t looking for models.

You were looking for her.


End file.
